Are we Celebrating the Nomadic Elite too Much?

What is your perception of a traditional work career or a traditional worker? How would you describe it? Would you picture an employee with a nine-to-five working day, personal desk, structured career path, long-term employment, and conventional career progression? Would your perception involve such aspects as stability, routine, commitment, narrow expertise, and experience? Or do you feel that this picture is outdated?

If it is the latter, your perception is not uncommon, it might just mirror what we largely hear and read from the social media. Modern careers and today’s professionals are popularly depicted using such terms as flexibility, freedom, boundaryless career, mobility, and globalism. Speaking more specifically about leaders, we continuously stumble upon descriptions of this new generation of leaders, the nomadic ones, the ones called Generation Flux. As Gianpiero Petriglieri, associate professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, puts it, Generation Flux leaders are the current winners in the world of work. And these winners are depicted as leaders, who ‘have actually been able to craft work lives that are more authentic, more expressive of who they really are, and also freer, less tethered to the demands of impersonal, instrumental organization’.

What is interesting though is that despite this popularized, currently trending, and somewhat ‘romantic’ view of these nomadic leaders, they form still a minority. As such, the accessibility and prevalence of this nomadic working life is a myth. In other words, yes, we do celebrate nomadic and flexible employees, who constantly move around pursuing their passions, but the majority of us do not seem to fit this image. The majority stays in one place and still values the stability that this one place has to offer. Is this majority still falling into the category of traditional workers? Professor Petriglieri says that we have a nomadic leadership elite, belonging to a community that is not accessible for everyone, and that creates a certain gap or disconnect between the leading elite and the majority followership.

According to Perriglieri, this disconnect between leaders and followers results in a lack of trust towards leaders. Indeed, one of the basic psychological principles is that we like and trust people, who are similar to us. Therefore, let’s say for a routine white collar worker it might be quite difficult to connect to and trust a leader, whose working place is his laptop and whom you see more often via skype meetings than in the office. The same way that it is impossible to be in two places at the same time, it is unlikely to be both flexible and committed. Gianpiero Petriglieri emphasizes that this choice between flexibility and commitment is something that nomadic leaders are confronted with – if you constantly move around, you do not belong to the local group, you are not fully accepted and trusted; and if you are staying put in one place with one group, you cannot move around that much. Either way there will be a loss that nomadic leaders need to cope with.

Another implication that I personally see stemming from this notion of a nomadic elite relates to the satisfaction of the non-nomadic majority. As suggested, the nomadic elite are today’s winners, who seem to have an important influence on our understanding of ‘how it should be’, and ‘what is a ‘right’ way to work’ nowadays. Plainly speaking, it is a trend that many want to follow. Yet, the ‘elite’ is limited, and a boundaryless following of your passion is not an option for everyone. What does this do to the majority then? Well, what are the consequences of feeling that you ‘ought’ to do or be someone different from what your reality allows? I would propose a lack of satisfaction and decreased motivation as possible outcomes.

All in all, I wonder whether we are not celebrating the nomadic elite too much. Although the myth we like to believe in and the ‘heroes’ we tend to look up to make up for a beautiful passion-driven, free-spirited and globally mobile picture of modern work, we should respect the many other different, but very real pictures as well. Moreover, it might be useful to adopt a more down-to-earth understanding of the nomadic elite, who comes with their own set of achievements and challenges.